Is sport the new religion?

I wanted to share an amusing but in many ways revealing quotation I just came across at the ever-absorbing blog of Jules Evans. This blog post is particularly worth a read, posing the question of whether we ask too much of Sport, and whether Sport may be filling spiritual gaps that religion left behind. That's a big question that Jules deals with in depth and which I hope to return to, but for now:

From the leader piece in The Times the day after Andy Murray won Wimbledon, by Simon Barnes:

"Joy puts it too conservatively. This was beyond all earthly concepts of joy: this was, for a few moments of eternity, nothing less than bliss. This really is something pretty immense: something nobody from this country has done since the world was young, something he has dedicated his life to….by the end it really seemed as if something more than a sporting prize had been won – as if some mythical, mystical quest had been achieved. It didn’t feel like a mere metaphor when he at last picked up that magic golden cup; it really seemed that this really was the Holy Grail."

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